We’ve worked with everyone from big ad agencies to really smart PhD Digital Marketers, but so far BAMF is the only group that’s driven ROI in Digital Marketing for GoodUnited.
Nick Black, CEO of GoodUnited
A million LinkedIn views a year is what most of us target.
But, how about 7 million?
…in just a third of the time.
Yes, you read that right.
This is a zero to hero story.
The story of how Nick Black, an SaaS entrepreneur who was on a mission to make sure that his managed services for non-profits to secure funding could help as many as possible.
But, this is also the story of how having the right LinkedIn strategy combined with the right motive can take your growth to the next level.
Who Exactly is Nick?
Nick Black is one of the founders and CEO of GoodUnited.io, a pretty new SaaS startup that provides managed services for non-profits focused on Facebook Fundraisers.
In the literal sense, he was a hero, being a former combat vet, he also had a passion project “Stop Soldier Suicide” which eventually led to GoodUnited.
Nick had the passion and vision.
But, what he needed was a plan for growth.
The Challenge
What Nick had going was perfect on paper.
It had a great vision and mission, it was in a niche that hasn’t been fully taken off, and he was positioned correctly.
The challenge was that he was still relatively unknown and his brand needed a little name recall.
What made it difficult was the fact that he was still new in the space and we needed to strategically play this like a startup.
And, he needed clients yesterday.
What Needed to be Done?
GoodUnited needed to:
- Have a growth strategy and plan in place for the future.
- Bring in clients and new collaborators into his company to build a revenue stream.
- Create a brand awareness campaign that would get people interested in what he had to offer.
- Put Nick’s stories out there to inspire people and establish him as a thought leader.
It seemed like a tall order, but there was actually a lot of untapped potential that we could unleash.
We just needed to plan out when.
What BAMF Did to Help
Nick already had the stories.
That meant 50 percent of the work was already done.
Content Design
We were in a lot of meetings with Nick, just talking to him and learning about his struggles and the things that made him who he was.
Extracting his heart was the goal of all of these meetings.
And, they became the backbone of our entire content strategy.
Given Nick’s stories and his particular niche, he didn’t need viral giveaways like other industries, the plan was a series of plain text founder stories that were scheduled to go out consistently.
The approach was simple.
- Each story would give a glimpse into each stage of Nick’s story until he got to the founder part.
- The lack of chronology would add an air of mystery into his life until you pieced it all together.
- We focused on relatable struggles that his audience would respond well to.
- We also included stories that the general public could relate to such as getting a GMAT, struggling with funding, etc.
- Copywriting was done in-house incorporating his voice.
- Nick had final approval before we released it.
The content had two purposes:
- To build brand awareness
- To nurture leads that we had acquired through outbound outreach.
Build an Outreach Program
Most non-profits already have a LinkedIn account because a lot of donors and collaborators get tapped using the platform.
This only meant one thing.
Nick had to be doing his outreach on LinkedIn, too.
The first step was to identify a list of possible clients and collaborators using targeted ideal customer personas.
Next, we created special messaging that was personalized and start making building his network.
Building a wider network served four purposes for Nick:
- It increased the number of prospects that he had.
- It increased the number of people who could see his posts – if he had more primary connections, more people can share his posts, and more second and third-degree connections would be able to see it.
- Number 2, would contribute to building traction for virality.
- It established him as an influencer in his field – a prerequisite for industry leaders is a ton of targeted followers.
It didn’t end with just outreach.
Since the content was already working to nurture leads, we added custom follow-up messages as well.
Now we can’t disclose what the exact messaging is, but it was tailored to the audience and based on their reaction to the first message that was sent.
Lead journey maps have to be tweaked depending on the responses of prospects, this allows for messaging to resonate with them.
Results
In a month, LinkedIn content views spiked to three million.
The next month came a pullback, but we were still around the one million mark.
October the trend continued and we were hitting views above two million.
I think it would be safe to say that the LinkedIn content campaign was doing great if you asked us.
Really, really great.
The connection acceptance rate was 44 percent after we ran his outbound outreach campaign.
This was beyond our benchmark, even at a crazy growth hacking agency like BAMF.
But, here’s what really took us by surprise.
Given his focus and his personalized messages, we were able to bring up his reply rate by 62 percent.
Now, if you’ve read most of the case studies that we have at BAMF, this is very high.
Smashing benchmarks with connection acceptance rates and message reply rates is just one part of outbound lead generation.
What matters is the number of qualified sales calls.
Think of them as your sales-qualified leads.
In just four months we were able to help Nick book 76 calls.
That’s an average of almost 20 calls a month after the initial momentum build up.
Among these 76 calls, Nick was able to bag significant non-profits such as the American Lung Association, Forbes Nonprofit Council, and the American Red Cross.
This was a great bump to his roster of clients that he could help, help other people.
You know why we’re so happy about his results?
It’s because we got to see the power of helping.
We did our best to help Nick, he tried his best to help non-profits, and they in turn, did their best to help others out.
It was a chain of people helping each other.
And, that makes this job worth it.
Nick Black
Takeaways
This is one of the remarkable case studies that we have at BAMF because it focused on thought leadership through content.
By using Nick’s voice we were able to get him the brand recognition that GoodUnited deserved, and put him in a position to bring in more leads for his venture.
Nick was in no short supply of inspiring stories.
But, he needed someone to tell them for him and organize it in away that brings in growth for a worthwhile venture.
Nick Black’s story might seem like a story of how an SaaS niche can rack up millions of LinkedIn views through proper positioning and strategy.
But, it goes beyond that.
The GoodUnited story is also a story of how you can help people help people.
And, that’s what we do at BAMF.
We want to help you, to get to help the people that you want to help.
